Human Bonds

‘Help Me to Find My People,’ by Heather Andrea Williams

“Who are your people?” It’s a question exchanged often by black Southerners to identify kith and kin. But few remember that its roots can be traced to the after­math of the Civil War. Once emancipated, former slaves desperately searched for family members who had been sold away from them. Their plaintive entreaty — “Help me to find my people” — provides the title and the subject of Heather Andrea Williams’s latest book.

An associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Williams examines the historical fact of family separation and renders its emotional truth. She is the rare scholar who writes history with such tenderness that her words can bring a reader to tears. The stories aren’t easy to bear. Delia Garlic, a freedwoman, recalls: “Babies was snatched from their mothers’ breasts and sold to speculators. Children was separated from sisters and brothers and never saw each other again. Course they cry; you think they not cry when they was sold like cattle? I could tell you about it all day, but even then you couldn’t guess the awfulness of it.”

Consistent with the unevenness of historical information about the poor and the marginal, the book presents more vignettes than long-form stories. Yet it has a propulsive narrative flow, and with each successive chapter the suppleness of Williams’s prose grows. She observes that among the enslaved there were distinct ways of coping with the constant threat of loss, and of living with the grief of permanent separation. Simultaneously, some whites embraced the fiction that black people lacked the capacity to feel deeply, which allowed them to dissociate from the horror of human trafficking. Others simply pretended not to hear the wails.

Photo

Charlie Crump, a former slave from North Carolina, and his granddaughter.Credit
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Williams informs us that about a third of children in the upper South endured family separation, an experience both devastating and disorienting. “The reality of being sold baffled children,” she writes. “It took time to sink in.”

At risk of beatings and death, many attempted to keep their bonds intact: running away to follow the one sold; sending messages through black men, slave or free, who traveled; and passing along humble family heirlooms. Faith grew deeper with loss. People sang spirituals of reunion in the world beyond, despite separation on earth.

Williams couples accounts of family disconnection with a judicious use of research on trauma. This interior gaze invites readers to imagine the slave’s life: What if a man carrying a whip and a Colt revolver at his waist were to walk off with your mother . . . forever? What if, like Henry Box Brown, you were left to watch from the side of the road, helpless and speechless, as your wife and children departed with their new owner? Like Brown, would you have been compelled to ship yourself to freedom in a 3-by-2-by-2.5-foot wooden box? Williams draws on memoirs, letters, journals, newspapers and fictions to place us inside these harrowing moments.

The bulk of her book is set during slavery. But finally, it reaches an apex: freedom. After Emancipation, a passionate flurry ensued. People’s desire to reunite with loved ones was urgent. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established by the federal government, and the Freedmans Association for the Restoration of Lost Friends, founded by “a group of white men” in Washington, made efforts to assist them. Of their own accord, freedpeople published advertisements in newspapers like The Colored Tennessean and The Christian Recorder. Black church services included public readings of these ads.

Never­theless, most of the beloved were lost forever. Rarely, and miraculously, some were found. Williams shares a few of these evocative stories. Most significant, however, is her revelation of the bonds forged by the collective grief and resilient love of a people finding themselves.

HELP ME TO FIND MY PEOPLE

The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery

By Heather Andrea Williams

Illustrated. 251 pp. The University of North Carolina Press. $30.

Imani Perry, a professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, is the author of “More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States.”

A version of this review appears in print on July 1, 2012, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Human Bonds. Today's Paper|Subscribe